August, 2007
You are looking at posts that were written in the month of August in the year 2007.
Week 6: Reporter’s Guide to Citizen Journalism
Posted on August 29th, 2007 by kmburb.
Categories: Uncategorized.
I have been so inspired by reading the past articles/lectures on OhmyNews that I have joined up to become a citizen journalist! Within a day of registering and submitting an article it was up on the main page, along with other stories from all over the world!!! At last check it had had 969 hits, so hopefully a few more people will read it before the day is out. I’m very excited!
I’m heading up to Sydney soon, on the same weekend that the APEC summit happens to be on. After joining OMNI and learning how to edit audio files in this week’s readings I am considering doing some “on the street” stories while I am there…will see how that goes.
This ties in neatly though with the comment Reuters chief, Tom Glocer, made in this week’s reading: “I believe the world will always need editing… the role of old media companies in the new-media age is that of content facilitator, tools provider and editor.” The editors at OhmyNews must receive copious amounts of material and they have to decide what is relevant, and what is of a good enough quality to use. The article I wrote is about the Pulp Mill being planned for Northern Tasmania. The fact that the article is on a very current issue no doubt helped it to be posted on the main page so quickly.
On another note, the following opinion from the reading fits in well with what I wrote about Facebook in some of my first posts: “Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, recently told the FT Digital Media and Broadcast conference that mainstream media should now focus its mind on connecting with the growing number of online communities and social networks.” There’s a whole youth network out there if people are willing to tap into it…
Week 5: OhmyNews in South Korea
Posted on August 14th, 2007 by kmburb.
Categories: Uncategorized.
How revelatory and public minded is Oh’s outlook, obvious through his comment that “OhmyNews wasn’t created just to make money, it was created to change society.” And change society is certainly has.
It has revolutionised world journalism and brought great attention to the notion and practice of citizen journalism. I was very inspired to hear how a simple idea Oh had as an undergraduate was eventually implemented to be a huge international success.
As far as online media goes, OhmyNews is far ahead of its competitors in the newspaper industry who have since extended into online news as well. Primarily this is because OhmyNews was designed specifically for the internet, and has been able to capitalise on the use of online advertising. OhmyNews also has a far greater resource of journalists (60,000 citizen reporters who submit about 200 stories a day) than printed-news companies do.
What I found very interesting, and a little sad, is how after the founders and citizen journalists of OhmyNews have managed to help shake up the tight hold the South Korean political system has traditionally had on the nation’s media, Korean journalists now face another issue: the pressure from advertisers. This is an issue western journalists have had to deal with for a long time already. It is a good thing that OhmyNews strives to maintain editorial integrity, free from the powerful influence of the advertisers.
Week 4: Nieman Report: Citizen and Netizen Journalism
Posted on August 7th, 2007 by kmburb.
Categories: Uncategorized.
There are many fascinating stories about the inception and use of citizen journalism (mainly in relation to Ohmynews) all over the world.
Oh Yeon-ho, the founder of Ohmynews, believed that “Citizen Reporters can be called guerrillas, because they are not professional and regulars and they post news from perspectives uniquely their own, not those of the conservative establishment.”
At first I thought that “guerrillas” would only be necessary in a media environment such as what exists in South Korea, not here in Australia. And then I thought, or are they? Maybe we do need guerrilla citizen reporters here.
Just because I may not be aware of a need to break through any repressive regimes in our own country’s media, that is more likely to be because I am under the influence of the media and do not question the need for further investigative journalism or a more democratic functioning of journalism, rather than there not actually being a need for guerrilla journalists in Australia.
Does Australia need a model of Ohmynews too? Am I just too unaware of what need there is for a more open media in this country?
The concept of the internet being a “laboratory for democracy” is particularly interesting. Imagine if we had enough netizen power to vote in the type of government we really wanted in Australia, just as netizens voted in a new and relatively unknown president in South Korea. We could use the power the internet has given us to a far greater extent if we were really politically inclined to do so, and if we were conscious enough about the issues we face in this country’s media.
As Fiza Fatima Asar writes (in Time to Think: Reflections on the uses and abuses of the media): “We have a great responsibility to ourselves and others to comprehend and promote the truth.” Hopefully this is something citizen journalism will do a lot more of.